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Below is a look at the past morbidity (how many people became sick) of what were once very common infectious diseases, and the current morbidity in the U.S. There’s no smallpox and no polio, almost no measles, dramatically less chickenpox (also known as varicella) and H. influenza (that’s not flu, but a bacteria that can cause deadly meningitis.

This should drive home how effective the common childhood inoculations, made by Merck, Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline, and Novartis, are. The pneumococcal vaccine, made by Pfizer, has resulted in dramatic drops in meningitis and pneumonia. When Bristol-Myers Squibb lost a patent case related to its hepatitis B drug the other week, investors shrugged, because children here are vaccinated against hepatitis B, so this isn’t a big market. The pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine has been failing us, because immunity against it fades. But there’s still a dramatic reduction in what was once a common disease.

Update: To be clear, these data represent data collected in 2007 on past incidence of these diseases. This was published here, in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The current data are annualized cases for 2010, per thelink to the original data that I had included above.

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Sure. Medicine started to actually figure out what it was doing around the turn of the century, and better hygiene went a long way. But without the vaccines there were still rates of many of these diseases we’d consider horrific today. Improvements in treatment and hygiene would not have continued to drop mortality rates as vaccines did. As I said above, handwashing does not drop the death rate to zero.

Hi Christmas: Can you tell me of a human-to-human transmissible disease which has been 98, 99, or 100% reduced through non-vaccination public health measures? (Tuberculosis may be mainly eliminated in the US without ongoing vaccine usage, but it is problematic elsewhere and many countries do vaccinate against it) I can name a lot of ongoing diseases for which there is no vaccine and ongoing mortality and morbidity.

Of course, it would have been more accurate and honest if you included some syringes at the bottom showing the statistics for autism, both in the past and today, but I’m sure the Pharma reps that commissioned this graphic (and your article) wanted that information left out. They’ll probably ask you to scrub this comment as well…

It’s clear that the increase in diagnoses of autism is not being caused by vaccines. I think autism is a big problem, but blaming it on vaccines helps no one. There is simply no evidence. It was a reasonable hypothesis, but it does not appear to be true.

I’m really not digging this graphic. 1. In what order are the diseases listed? 2. What does the red represent? The red on the left appears to represent the percentage, which is listed down the middle. The red on the right appears to represent the difference from 100 of the red on the left. 3. The actual morbidity figures, and number of recent cases figures, appear to have no representation in the graphic, other than the figures themselves. They are merely listed, as they would be in a data table. 4. Why are the needles staggered, on both the left and the right? Why not line them up? Really not impressed with the design of this graphic.

Make a better one, send it to me, and I’ll post it. I was impressed enough by the graphic that I thought it would be better to share it, and give the original creator credit, than to re-do it myself. There are lots of things I’d do differently, but this is clearly catching people’s imagination.

Dear Mr. Herper, I’m sure you understand the difference between correlation and causation. I could just as easily say the numbers on the left are pre-microwave oven, and the numbers on the right are after the invention of the microwave oven. Therefore, the decline in disease morbidity is due to the microwave oven. It’s absurd. Just like this graphic is.

If you want to see the truth… take a look at the graphs of the morbidity decline mapped to the year the vaccine was introduced. What you will find is in virtually all cases, the vaccine was introduced at the very end of the decline in disease.

Therefore, the cause of the decline in morbidity cannot be vaccination. Rather, it was due to advancements in public health and hygiene. Hand washing. Sewer systems. And so on.

I covered this earlier in the thread. But yes, having covered medicine (mostly clinical trials) for the past decade I understand correlation and causation very well. This is why we have randomized controlled trials of vaccines, and every new vaccine is tested against a placebo to show that it does decrease infections of the disease of concern.

We can also look at recently introduced vaccines. Look at the dramatic reduction in cases of invasive pneumococcus infection since the introduction of the pneumococcus vaccine. I wrote about that here. Or look at this graph, which I wrote about here, showing the decrease in diarrhea deaths in Mexico due to the rotavirus vaccine.

In fact, here is the rotavirus image:

Yes, better sewers and medical care resulted in a drop in infectious disease mortality. But you can’t just assume that would have continued. Hand washing will not get your infection rate to zero. A good vaccine can.

Interesting Graph and very illustrative of the benefits of vaccination. I will however note that the spikes in Diarrhea fatalities most likely are linked with a seasonal change most likely the rainy season which starts in May-June in southern Mexico and Central America.

The point is that you add the vaccine, those spikes go away. And, as others have pointed out previously, the vaccine doesn’t make diarrhea deaths stop, because this includes deaths from all causes of diarrhea, not just rotavirus.